State of the Browser: Chrome closes on Firefox, IE6 dying out

In the continuing browser wars, 2011 was a bad year for Microsoft and Mozilla …

The browser story in December mirrored the broader 2011 trends. After a surprising result in November, in which it held steady, Internet Explorer resumed normal service in December, with its market share continuing to fall. Chrome once more made gains, closing the gap with rival Firefox.

The story for 2011 as a whole was much the same. Internet Explorer lost 7.39 points of desktop market share over the course of the year. Firefox also fell over the year, losing 1.86 points in total. These browsers' losses were WebKit's gain: the two major WebKit-based browsers, Chrome and Safari, gained 8.75 and 0.95 points respectively. Opera too fell over the course of the year, finishing 2011 0.61 points lower than it closed 2010.

Chrome has become the alternative browser of choice. Firefox's growth at Internet Explorer's expense has been halted and now reversed, with large numbers of users defecting from both Microsoft's and Mozilla's browsers. Strong promotion, robust upgrading, and vigorous grassroots promotion of the browser have resulted in rapid adoption that shows no signs of slowing.

Though Chrome's automatic updates remain the best in the browser industry, its pool of non-upgrading users continues to be a significant feature. About 15 percent of Chrome users are using a version that's at least two versions old. Though they only represent a small fraction of total Internet usage at the moment, this straggler demographic will grow as Chrome does.

Uptake of Firefox 8 appears to be going well, with users of the old Firefox 3.6 slowly moving away from that platform. Firefox too seems to have a straggler problem, again with about 15 percent of users on the "rapid release" track (versions 4 and higher) using an out-of-date version.

Microsoft is no stranger to the non-upgrading demographic, with considerable numbers of people using Internet Explorer 6 or 7 in spite of the availability of versions 8 and 9. The situation may start to improve shortly. Announced in mid-December, Microsoft is going to start shipping Internet Explorer as an automatic update to Windows Update users. Previously, Internet Explorer was an automatic update that required manual intervention to actually install; Windows Update would start an installation wizard that required the user to click through to install the browser. That wizard process has now been eliminated.

This month, users in Australia and Brazil will start to pick up the browser automatically. Assuming the rollout goes smoothly, Microsoft will expand the automatic deployments to other markets. Even when the switch is thrown globally, not all systems will be upgraded. Administrators will be able to block installation, and users who have previously rejected the upgrade won't have their systems updated.

Nonetheless, this is a highly welcome change that should go a long way towards moving Internet Explorer users forward. Progress on that front is encouraging. Internet Explorer 6 saw a surprising increase in usage in November, but normal service was resumed in December, with both Internet Explorer 6 and 7 dropping to new lows of 7.66 and 4.87 percent, respectively.

In the US, usage of IE6 dropped below 1 percent for the first time since its 2001 release. The Czech Republic, Mexico, Portugal, Philippines, and Ukraine also hit the 1 percent threshold last month. These countries are joining an elite group of countries—Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland, and Sweden—in which Internet Explorer 6 has below 1 percent of the market. Bringing up the rear is China, where the ancient browser still holds 25.2 percent of the market.

Our usage here at Ars showed small drops for Internet Explorer and Firefox, with small gains for Safari and Chrome. In mobile, the Android browser edged ahead of mobile Safari.

Chrome Source doesn't seem any faster than the rest, not even faster than IE, which is supposed to be the dog of the group.

Chrome does have significant usability deficiencies IMO: - It isn't very configurable. Very few user options. How do you turn of GIF animations? You can't AFAICT.- Plug ins are inferior in numbers and in quality of execution.- Middle mouse button scrolling is horrendous. This looks like scrolling an interlaced screen it is so bad, while I can read Opera/FF/IE.

Balanced against usability deficiencies is a supposed speed advantage, that seems largely the product of placebo effect based on benchmarks that will have little to do with real world browsing experience.

There are also some spouting memory issues like they haven't used FF since version 3.x. FF 9.x has significantly reduced memory footprint and also as a separate process for plugins so they don't take down the browser if they go bad. FF9 is both slim and robust.

And while not a huge deal, I find it annoying that IE9 and Chrome have no search bar, so it defaults to ONE engine.

Bing in MS's case, Google in Chrome's of course.That's another thing I'd add to my list of issues with Chrome (again can probably be fixed with a little bit of elbow grease but still)- no built-in search bar.

Right now I have a search engine to search all of Craigslist, a search engine for Google Products (Froogle for those who still remember it by that name) and Wikipedia. For me, using ctrl+e to start a new search on a price search engine or Wikipedia gets to be a useful habit.

With Chrome, you're stuck with a SUPERBAR. So amazing, and it's not really innovation, it's because they don't want you to search anything but 1 engine.

Again, another problem with a for-profit browser. Outside of a stunning victory that causes Mozilla to shut their doors, I can't see any, if ever enough reasons to leave the open source champ.

I prefer Opera over IE and Chrome. But IE is indispensable if I have to login to my corporate network to do some work and utilize the VPN and Sharepoint sites (and whatever else only works well with IE), or if you find a website that gives any trouble (which I have no examples of failures with FF as I do Chrome)- IE always works.

So that leaves me with FF + IE for backup, on all my systems. I don't bother with much else at this point, though every few months I'll install Chrome, do some testing and end up repulsed.